The wolves have returned to Iowa. Or at least a wolf.
In February, a man hunting coyotes shot a gray wolf in northeast Iowa’s Buchanan County. This is the first documented wolf in Iowa since 1925, which reportedly could have been an escaped captive animal. Before that, according to the 2012 Iowa DNR wolf status report, there hadn’t been a valid wolf recorded in Iowa since the 1880s.
The wolf has had a troubled history with humankind. The “only good wolf is a dead wolf” mentality led to their methodical yet zealous extirpation in the United States. By 1974, the year the gray wolf earned protected status via the Endangered Species Act, only 300 were left in the lower 48. Today it’s about 6,000. In neighboring Minnesota, their population now fluctuates between 2,000 and 3,000.
In 2011, the recovered gray wolf was delisted, and the human impulse to destroy it immediately took hold once again. Minnesota and Wisconsin quickly reinstated wolf hunts. In the past two years, the DNR reports that over 600 wolves were killed in Minnesota, and since 2011, over 2,500 wolves have been killed in the lower 48. There are currently no biological or population management reasons to hunt wolves. It is purely “recreational.” Despite its federal delisting, the wolf is still protected in Iowa. The Iowa hunter said he thought the animal he shot was a coyote, and the DNR excused him because he brought the carcass to authorities and “cooperated.” Even so, the female Canis lupus was twice the size of a coyote, and the DNR has warned those who enjoy shooting animals to “make sure of your target. If in doubt, don’t shoot.” Such discretion was sorely lacking.
This month, my family and I, as usual, head to northern Minnesota near Ely and the Boundary Waters. We have learned much about wolves, especially thanks to the International Wolf Center in Ely. Over the years, we have seen or heard wolves in the wild several times. They have even responded to our own howls over the still, dark waters of a nighttime pond.
My family does not fear wolves—there’s little to fear. In the past 100 years, there have been two human fatalities in North America due to wolves. Compare this to domestic dogs, which kill 25 to 35 people per year, or hunters, who kill nearly 100 people per year in the U.S. and Canada.
Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s essay “Deify the Wolf” in her book Dwellings is set in Ely, and she beautifully expresses the attraction of the wolf. Hearing “the howl of wolves breaking through a northern night” stirs one to “[remember] the language of that old song. It stirs inside the body, taking us down from our world of logic, down to the deeper lost regions of ourselves into a memory so ancient we have lost the name for it.”
Much of what my family and I love about the North Woods is embodied in the wolf. As Hogan says, northern Minnesota is “a terrain that is at the outermost limits of our knowledge, and it is a shadowy world, one our bones say is the dangerous borderland between humans and wilderness.” My family certainly doesn’t demonize this compelling forest creature, but neither do we romanticize it. We respect the wolf very much, and we always hope for an encounter.
According to the DNR the Iowa wolf most certainly came from Minnesota or Wisconsin. As Orlan Love said in The Gazette’s May 7 article, “The confirmation of the animal as a wolf … closes the circle on big predators that, though once exterminated, have re-entered Iowa, at least in small numbers—black bear, mountain lion and now the wolf.”
However subtly, Iowa is rewilding, which is good news. Iowa ranks 49th in the country for least amount of public land. As an ecosystem, Iowa’s overly domesticated landscape is almost entirely dysfunctional. The wolf is a key ecological species, and its reintroduction can help set nature’s scales right, even increase biodiversity. One wolf obviously won’t do that in Iowa, and full species recovery in America’s corn belt is doubtful. But the Buchanan County wolf gives hope to reclaiming our essence as creatures of the natural world.
Most of us seek wildness in some way, are compelled by it, drawn to its plaintive howl across a dark lake or meadow. It strikes sympathetic chords in our primal core. As the wild returns to Iowa, we are all better—and more complete—for it.
Thomas Dean is a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night.
